Posts Tagged ‘chiles’

George Stephens, Sr. fabricated the first prototype of his iconic Weber kettle grill in 1952. My family didn’t get the memo until the 1970s, meaning that all the steaks that ended up on our table were cooked on a grill with a lidless shallow fire pan. I recall the grill grate could be raised or lowered via a crank-operated center stem over the coals, but only by a couple of inches. Consequently, everything was direct grilled. And my father did steaks one way and one way only—hot, fast, and well done, seasoned...

Photo by Rob Baas.
You may know them as jalapeño poppers, armadillo eggs, rattlesnake eggs, or even ABTs. Whatever you call them, stuffed smoked jalapeños rock the grill across the U.S.
A bite-size variant of Mexican chiles rellenos, poppers have been around since the 1970s. Early versions were typically stuffed with cheese, then breaded and fried. Naturally, it didn’t take barbecuers long to discover these babies were even better when grilled.
A Facebook query on the...

If you’ve spent any time on this website (or just hanging around the grill), you’ll know the deep reverence for and alarmingly heavy-handedness we grilling fanatics have with hot sauce.
Bottled hot sauce is good. Homemade hot sauce is better. But when you introduce fermentation to hot sauce (you know, the process that transforms cabbage into sauerkraut and fresh sausage into salami), you produce a hot sauce with complex umami flavors—a condiment worthy of your best grilling.
Which brings me to Chicago barbecue fanatic...

Chili concocted outside of Texas is usually a weak, apologetic imitation of the real thing.
—Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th President of the United States
If you have invited a Texan to your table, do not—I repeat, do not—serve chili. You might have the best of intentions. But trust me: Nothing good will come of it. Texans have very strong, deeply embedded opinions about their “bowl of red.” There are arguments about what should go into it...

Did you know every day, every week, and every month of the year honors a particular food or drink? Thanks to a blend of presidential proclamations and industry and trade association lobbying, the calendar for 2014 is entirely committed. (It’s reassuring to know that Congress does something…)
You say you missed “National Bloody Mary Day” on January 1? No problem. You can catch one of several days this month honoring alcoholic beverages, including Hot Buttered...

On Saturday and Sunday, August 31 and September 1 -- Labor Day weekend -- 30,000 heat seekers will converge on tiny Hatch, New Mexico, for the 42nd annual Hatch Chile Festival. The town of Hatch, population 1680, is the self-proclaimed “Chile Capital of the World” -- and who are we to argue?
A few years ago, I visited New Mexico during chile season, which lasts only a few weeks during August and September. As I noted in BBQ USA, “Every barbecue region in America...

The iconic movie character Forrest Gump (played by Tom Hanks) famously observed life “was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” The same is true for any capsicum that’s not the mild-mannered bell pepper. Even a single chile plant can produce fruit of varying potency, from mild to tongue blistering. So eating chiles is akin to Russian roulette.
On YouTube we watched in horror as one culinary thrill-seeker, Jamie Kocher, ate a bhut jolokia, more commonly known as the...